Millennial spending confidence offers support for outlook

Clothing, health and beauty are benefitting most among categories from the confidence trends. Homegoods also show mixed signs of opportunity among generations.

The latest confidence numbers suggest that the outlook will be challenged by spending confidence that has moved mostly sideways among generations other than Millennials. As a result, Millennials will lead the growth opportunities in the short term.

Clothing. Confidence to spend on clothing over the next 90 days moved higher as a result of a relatively broad-based pickup across three generational groups. This may explain some of the strength among apparel specialty stores evident in the latest retail sales data (post found here). See the report below for more on clothing spending confidence.

Health & beauty. Confidence to spend on health and beauty categories has moved mostly sideways in recent months, but was led higher in June by two key generations. See the report below for more.

Food & grocery. Spending confidence in this category remained flat in June and down from a high reached in March, with few positive signs among generations. See the report below for more.

Homegoods. Confidence to spend on homegoods edged higher in June, but was much stronger among two key generations. See the report below for more.

Electronics. Confidence to spend on electronics shows underlying strength—despite only edging higher in June at an aggregate level. Confidence in the category was stronger among a key generation. And the category shows the strongest year-to-year and year-to-date gains among all categories. See the report below for more.

Leisure goods. Confidence to spend on these goods—including sporting goods, toys, music, and videos—edged higher at an aggregate level. The categories were led by sustained gains among two demographic segments. See the report below for more.

These are among the takeaways from data through June from the Spending Confidence Index™, which is the proprietary index of consumer sentiment created by MacroSavvy™ based on data from Prosper Insights and Analytics™.

For more background about the Spending Confidence Index™ and its components, the white paper at this link explains why the new index is an improvement over existing measures of confidence.